All of which means that, somewhere in England, Holmes' creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is harrumphing in his grave.
That's because Doyle fucking hated Holmes. Or, more accurately, he resented him. See, much like many of us who spent our younger years dreaming of being famous doctors or presidents or Evel Knievel, Doyle had big dreams of his own -- and they didn't involve inventing the preeminent detective story. Instead, he fancied himself more of a historical novelist and viewed his Holmes stories as "hack work" written for the sole purpose of making extra scratch to pay off his college loans.
M. Menpes
"The quicker I can write this crap, the quicker I can write checks."
In 1893 -- six years after penning his very first Sherlock Holmes tale and bearing the stress of ever-more-demanding deadlines thanks to the character's explosive popularity -- Doyle concocted his plan to off the detective, swearing that unless he struck first, Holmes would kill him. And so he published the short story "The Final Problem," which ended with Sherlock Holmes and his arch-nemesis, Moriarty, dying together after kicking each others' asses clear off the edge of a goddamned waterfall.
The public straight-up refused to let Holmes die, virtually ignoring Doyle's subsequent work until, a decade after Holmes' "final" adventure, he resurrected the character for scads more stories, wishing with every last word that he'd detailed the discovery of the detective's gory remains so that there could never have been any mystery surrounding the fact that the man was well and truly dead.
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